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AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4
A SPECTATOR BEST OF THE YEAR - AS CHOSEN BY REVIEWERS
The year is 1742. Goody Brown, saved from drowning and adopted when just a babe, has grown up happily in the smuggling town of Winchelsea. But when she turns sixteen, her father is murdered by men he thought were friends.
In a town where lawlessness prevails, Goody and her brother Francis must enter the cut-throat world of her father's killers in order to find justice. Facing high seas and desperate villains, she discovers what life can be like without constraints or expectations, developing a taste for danger that makes her blood run fast.
Goody was never born to be a gentlewoman. But what will she become instead?
— TOM HOLLAND
I was riveted. Winchelsea is a great read - terrific narrative drive, credible characters, and such an elegant creation of the backdrop in terms of both time and place
— PENELOPE LIVELY
Boisterous . . . evocative . . . What holds the novel together as much as its driving plot are its incantatory atmosphere and spellbinding language
Preston is a gifted prose cartographer, conjuring up the Sussex coastline in a crisp, clear fashion . . . He has written a bawdy, thunderous romp that echoes with cannon fire, sea shanties and the occasional plaintive cry of a nightjar
Glorious
Winchelsea is a remarkable act of literary time travel: dark and gripping and soaked in blood and salt water
— EVIE WYLD
[A] spellbinding read, both gory and gorgeous
Truly epic . . . The richness and enthusiasm of the prose speaks of a novelist who loves the process of spinning an unpredictable, fabulist yarn
A rip-roaring yarn about smugglers and seafarers in Romney Marsh and its coastal hinterland in the 18th century. The energy, word play and attention to contemporary detail could not be bettered
— The Books of the Year 2022
There's a wild piratical darkness to Winchelsea which is charged by the evocative and strange wilderness of its setting on the Romney Marshes. At its heart is a gripping tale: a life-and-death struggle, set in the eighteenth century yet vibrantly heightened by a sureness of visceral detail and a vivid depth of characterisation. This is historical drama on a deft and uproarious scale, and it makes for a breathlessly exciting and engaging read
— PHILIP HOARE
Alex Preston is an award-winning author of three novels: This Bleeding City, The Revelations and In Love and War, as well as a book of non-fiction, As Kingfishers Catch Fire. He writes regularly for the Telegraph, the Economist and Harper's Bazaar. He reviews books for the Observer's New Review, Financial Times and Spectator. Alex is co-founder of the Corfu Literary Festival and Patron of Oxford Literary Festival.
@ahmpreston